Entries by Jason Pramas

Hi folks,

Just an FYI that we'll be taking a much-needed Winter Break for a month. We'll be doing some housecleaning virtually and in our non-virtual office, and just kickin' back after a busy year.

We'll be back in mid-January--rested (more or less) and ready to blog.

Have a good holiday!

Cheers,

Jason
MGA

An open meeting law being pushed by Common Cause and the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association is running into the type of difficulties that have proved all too common in the latest session of the Massachusetts Legislature.

I had occasion to spend this year's National Day of Mourning (Thanksgiving) at my cousin's house in N. Attleborough, MA. And while it was pleasant enough--food plentiful and tasty, light conversation, cute kids running about--anytime spent south of Boston always makes me think of one of the nastier episodes in American history. King Philip's War. Participating, even half-heartedly, in a holiday glorifying the start of the European conquest of North America, in the same region where many of the war's most intense battles were fought sends a chill through the very core of my being.

Corporate Whore. It's an expression that gets tossed around not only among left-wingers in the U.S., but has also moved into general parlance. It's an epithet hung on people that pursue lucre in the corporate sector with an abandon that shocks even the average capitalist American. But now a growing number of people are selling themselves cheap as part of a PR phenonmenon called "Buzz Marketing." And the Boston Phoenix published an in-depth piece this week on how it's changing the way we think. Whether we like it or not.

While it may not have been evident to many of the 2000+ participants in last weekend's march and rally to end the occupation of Iraq and bring the troops home, the event represented a victory for civil liberties in Boston.

This Monday, October 24, 2005, at 1 p.m., Massachusetts Global Action members and allies from around the state will offer testimony in support of MA House Bill 1333, “An Act to Preserve Public Water and Sewer Systems.” If the reading public needs any proof regarding why the passage of a bill that will ban the private ownership or contractual control of public water and sewer systems, then one need look no further than the ongoing situation in Holyoke, MA—as covered in this week’s Republican (Springfield, MA).

Did you ever suffer through a week of endless bad news, and figure "screw it I'm going to just going to stop paying attention for a couple of days?" Seriously, the polar caps are really melting (and the satellite sent up to measure the melt rate just crashed), an influenza pandemic seems a virtual certainty, Pakistan just got whomped with a big earthquake, and the U.S. government is talking casually about tossing nukes around.

MA Governor Mitt Romney, and for that matter some of the regional press, seem to think that funding retroactive raises for thousands of staffers at state public colleges is some kind of optional thing. It is not. These are unionized workers, and the raises were part of negotiated contracts that state government has been reneging on in one way or another for years.

Last week, the Boston College administration used the excuse of the institution being privately-owned (by the Society of Jesus of the Catholic Church) to relieve students protesting the corporate death-merchants at Raytheon of some of their troublesome civil liberties.

One big story this week, that saw virtually no progressive spin in any media outlet, was the Massachusetts State Senate's passage of a nasty bill that will bring the Commonwealth down to the truly brutal welfare standards of the rest of the nation.

The pro-MCAS (Massachusetts' high stakes test for the pre-college set), Business Roundtable created, non-profit, Mass Insight Education, was in the news yesterday for a new plan being flogged by a gaggle of their pet local school superintendants to group together all the lowest performing school districts in the Commonwealth, run them together as a single district through a new state administration scratch-built for the purpose, and experiment with kid-popular policies like year-round schools--all for the questionable purpose of getting higher MCAS scores out of the districts.

The cost? $35 million a year. Best reaction? Massachuetts Teachers Association Vice President Anne Wass:

"I wish they would just take the money they were going to sink into this program, and give it to the schools that need it. This would do a lot more good, a lot faster, than all this red tape," she said.

The Center for Regional and Economic Policy, a "think and do tank" at Northeastern University, recently released their 2004 Housing Report Card for Boston. Their most important finding--that Boston has the most expensive housing in the U.S. and is, therefore, the most expensive city in the U.S. to live--has received significant media coverage.

What has received less attention is the report’s conclusion that young people are fleeing the state, and why building lots of public housing could reverse that trend.

An editorial in Sunday’s Boston Herald slammed the idea that there is anything to be concerned about regarding the idea of “Peak Oil” in what amounts to an astoundingly dimwitted defense of the current SUV culture—based solely on one Washington Post column by the head of a local oil and gas industry outfit, Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

Recently, our estimable governor, Mitt Romney, trooped out to Amherst to boast about his new-and-totally-unrelated-to-his-upcoming-presidential-bid $400 million plan for capital improvements to the Massachusetts public higher education system. Even though the UMass Board of Trustees was about to vote on $2.26 billion in capital improvements anyway. Luckily for us, the Springfield Republican was on hand to record the day’s festivities.

The Boston Globe continues their strange reportage of the ongoing job crisis in Massachusetts with a piece on last month’s stats from the Division of Employment and Training.

Despite the fact that the Commonwealth has only gained back a mere 25 percent of the jobs lost during the first year of the 2001 recession, the headline reads “State Reports Robust Jobs Gains.” But as the article makes clear, while the official gains are about 9500 jobs in July (in a job market of over 3,000,000, mind you), even that tepid number is actually overstated by not properly adjusting the figure for the transitory impact of seasonal jobs.

Two big stories this week demonstrate great threats approaching Massachusetts and the planet that will challenge progressives' ability to build a successful social movement while keeping our civilization intact. Humanity ignores these warning signs at our collective peril.

The first piece, in the Guardian UK, says that one of the "tipping points" that climatologists have noted will send global warming spiraling out of control has been reached. Siberia is melting. This is a serious problem since Western Siberia is mostly a giant peat bog the size of France and Germany combined. As its coating of permafrost goes away it will release huge amounts of methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Over the decades this process will likely take, the amount of carbon alone in the air will double worldwide--leading to a 10-25% increase in global warming.

Censorship is not just for high school students anymore. Still reeling from the Supreme Court's 1998 Hazelwood decision that severely restricted high school journalists' 1st amendment rights, young journalists--particularly young activist journalists--now have another strike against them in the form of the 7th Circuit Court decision, Hosty v. Carter, covered in this week's Village Voice.

This last Monday, July 25, marked one year since the Boston Social Forum. Initiated by MGA's predecesor organization, the Campaign on Contingent Work, the BSF brought together over 5000 attendees from virtually all sectors of the progressive movement from around our region, nation and world for 3 days of networking and strategizing across 550 events from July 23-25, 2004 at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

A long article on the perils of contingent jobs in the latest issue of Commonwealth--monthly magazine of the centrist think-tank, MassInc--might have been a credible effort in the mid-1990s when much about the contingent economy was new to most observers. But after years of research by analysts including MGA's predecessor organization, the Campaign on Contingent Work (CCW), it's pretty weak to spend thousands of words rehashing a problem that's been flogged to death already, and then take only the most tepid stab at proposing any solutions.

Having spent a childhood hanging out, working at, loving, and hating local malls, it was with disbelief that this blogger read a piece in today's edition of The Republican (Springfield, MA) that says that the Holyoke Mall at Ingleside has instituted an "MB18" ("Must Be 18") policy on Fridays and Saturdays from 4 p.m. to closing at the facility--after some "success" with similar rules at other malls owned by The Pyramid Companies.

It was shocking to discover that Massachusetts workers are only 31st in the nation in wasting time on the job. We blow off an average of a mere 1.9 hours a day—not including lunch. This according to a Boston Herald report on a survey by Needham, MA based Salary.com.

Over the last few weeks, a fight has been brewing over Pentagon plans to close dozens of military bases. While this would normally be cause for unabashed excitement among progressives there is something that makes this situation unfortunate.

That is, the bases are mostly closing in the industrial north--particularly here in the northeast. In a time of few good job opportunities for the tens of thousands of workers that will be laid off.

MGA often helps our partner organizations with press work--particularly in our main areas of interest. We've attached the main text from a series of press releases we've been doing for the folks doing the "March to Abolish Poverty" below.

Click here to check out the March's website.

[This blog entry contains plot spoilers]

What if Ayn Rand and Mussolini got together to write a Hollywood movie? The result would look something very like Batman Begins--the new blockbuster prequel to the Batman screen franchise.

Yesterday’s Boston Globe editorial “Workforce Work” exercises the same peculiar kind of logic that has hamstrung progressives’ ability to advance a successful course of action on the ongoing Massachusetts jobs crisis. While its argument for a better-educated workforce is certainly something to support, the Globe ignores the forest for the trees.